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Our people named among Sydney's most influential in 2012

30 November 2012

(L-R) Professor Simon Chapman and Dr Michael Biercuk have been named in the 100 most influential people in Sydney in 2012. Dr Biercuk told the Sydney Magazine: "Teaching the students is just as rewarding as getting a scientific result".

The Sydney Morning Herald has recognised two leading University of Sydney academics for their world-leading research and transformative influence on government policy in a list of Sydney's most influential people in 2012.

Professor Simon Chapman and Dr Michael Biercuk were both included in the Sydney Magazine, which highlights "the people who have changed our city for the better".

Having fought for tighter tobacco controls for more than three decades, Professor Chapman played an instrumental role in the federal government's world-first plain packaging legislation, effective this year.

Professor Chapman told the Sydney Magazine he remembers precisely where he was the moment he found out the Plain Packaging Act would become a reality:

"It was April 29 2010, and I know exactly where I was standing in my house and which phone I picked up when [then health minister] Nicola Roxon's office told me it was happening," he told the Sydney Magazine. "The next two years were non-stop."

Dr Michael Biercuk, who is primary investigator in the Quantum Control Laboratory at the University, is recognised for his ground-breaking research into quantum computing, which could develop a computer to make calculations that now require a machine larger than the size of the known universe.

Before moving to Sydney from the US in 2010, Dr Biercuk worked with an international team that included this year's Nobel Prize for Physics winner, David Wineland. The team this year published their findings on a tiny ion-crystal that could enable a computer to perform calculations that currently stump the world's most powerful supercomputers.